Melina Mercouri

Alongside glamour, Melina Mercouri's love life also marked a remarkable amount of sadness and loss.

At seventeen, in 1939, she hastily married the much older, wealthy landowner Panagis Harokopos — not out of love, but to escape the control of her family, who opposed her acting career. According to her brother Spyros Mercouris, she became pregnant during this marriage but suffered a severe miscarriage. She reportedly said afterwards: "never again" — and she never had any more children of her own.

According to her own family, the greatest love of her life was not Jules Dassin, but naval officer Pyrros Spyromilios. They were together for seven years in the late 1940s but never married. They eventually separated, and when he died of heart failure in March 1961 — five years after their split — she was completely devastated.

When she finally married Jules Dassin in 1966 — who was Jewish — she was excommunicated by the Greek Orthodox clergy, precisely at the moment when the junta had also stripped her of her Greek citizenship and possessions. Thus, in one fell swoop, she lost her homeland and her place within the church for the very people she loved.

Jules Dassin (1911–2008) was an American film director and screenwriter, known for film noir such as "Rififi" and "Never on Sunday". Blacklisted during the communist witch hunt in Hollywood, he moved to Europe. He married Melina Mercouri in 1966 and was the father of singer Joe Dassin.

Despite two marriages, Mercouri never had children of her own. She did, however, become the stepmother of Dassin's three children from a previous marriage, including the famous French singer Joe Dassin. In an interview in 1971, she said she had no regrets about this, but the tone of her words — "one should not be a martyr because one does not have a child" — nevertheless betrays a certain defensive attitude towards a painful subject.

The most moving aspects perhaps only surface on her deathbed. When she lay in the hospital with lung cancer at the end of her life, she said: "I thought I would be afraid of the disease, but what I fear most is not being loved." She died on March 6, 1994, with only Jules Dassin as her closest survivor by her side.

Pascal Brackman